291–300 of 337 posts
Titles in software are so stupid. Where I work, everyone is “Software Engineer” whether they have 20 months of experience or 20 years. The respect and pay are commensurate with on-the-job performance and output. I know a “principal engineer” who can talk the talk, write books and articles but can’t produce any software of real value, and I work with a guy who’s been working 1/8 as long as me and he’s ten times better…
Re: companies that claim to have a fully equivalent technical track: What I've found is that is mostly lip service. Yes, they publish salaries and requirements for the highest levels of engineering, and those salaries are equivalent to high levels of management as far as pay goes. But if you look a little deeper you see the problem. At Google and Amazon and Facebook, a Distinguished Engineer is equivalent to a Vice P…
I left my previous company before their ladder (~14+ months of work) was finally released so I'm not sure how it has worked out but one of the first drafts I saw had a rubric for gauging your growth / fit for the roles. One of the biggest things I took issue with was that you had to have some sort of "community involvement" but management had to approve your speaking engagements to some degree (be it time off, messag…
Jesus fucking Christ how is that even remotely acceptable as management feedback?
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That's the challenge in all engineering interviews - determining weather they did anything useful or were just on the team. I've had to tell people to stop telling me about "we" and tell me what "you" did. Some people are so caught up in trying to be a team player that they hide their contributions. Others use it to hide their lack of contribution. It's not hard to separate these once you're aware of the issue and st…
I personally always talk about what "we" did because it helps me get out of my own way. I worked at a company for like 6 years, and for almost 4 of them i was the sole engineer tasked with designing a database for the data, creating and deploying/maintaining an API server, and creating a handful of react frontend applications. The last 3 years we expanded into a "team" that I led and scaled it up from there. I never…
>> Frankly, what you just wrote is what I want to hear in an interview.
I completely agree. Look back at what you wrote here. The word "I" appears plenty of times in your post and is very appropriate. You're talking about your experience so it makes perfect sense to mention yourself in that. You also mentioned the team and "we" a bit. Good. There is a lot of space between talking about your experience and being an egotistical jerk. Talk about your experience just like your post here and you should be fine.
When I interview I'm primarily looking for 3 things on the technical side:
1) Can this person DO things?
2) Can they learn things?
3) Are the interested in doing and learning the kind things we need done?
In that short post you've demonstrated #1 and #2. You also covered some of the non-technical stuff. If you showed experience or interest in embedded C on micro controllers I'd be telling you to apply here (Detroit area).
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"But I am also at this weird point where I am not sure if the title of "staff/principle" can be transferred to another company. A lot of the value that I add now is because of the historical knowledge I have. What we have tried as a company, what we haven't, why we built some things the way we did, how things work currently, how the politics works and the trust I have built. " This worries me too. Within my company I…
I think you are wise to worry. Last year I was laid off from a company whose technology I helped build for years. I was promoted up to the position of "CTO"... with no team below me. It was a very small company working on email archiving and encryption that still runs today. As the system admin and solo developer I was spread thin, working on a system that now processes anywhere from 80 to 120 (150?) million emails a…
The interview process filters for coming up with solutions quickly. My strength has always been that I worked through a situation even after the initial or obvious approach(es) didn’t work. A lot of people give up quickly but I keep going and solve it. You sound similar.
Unfortunately the interview process doesn’t filter for that.
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> burdening them to “sell” their vision on some architecture, recruiting policy, whatever. Fair warning, if I ever interview you for a position of senior or higher, I will be evaluating your ability to sell your ideas to other engineers. Anyone who comes in as a Staff Engineer expecting to simply dictate their ideas to lower-ranked engineers without selling those ideas, is going to fail.
In that case, I would politely thank you for the chance to interview and decline to speak further with you, because it would be clear I would not be empowered to get my job done in the face of all the time-waster politics to lobby for projects or quarterly goals, etc. I would feel, “why have they hired an expert like me if they don’t plan to trust my advice on what action to take?”
> anyone who comes in as a Staff Engineer expecting to simply dictate their ideas to lower-ranked engineers without selling those ideas, is going to fail
was almost certainly about the field in general, not this person's immediate org or even company. So it's more like, "why would we hire an expert like you if we won't actually get the value we're paying for?"
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The challenge I have interviewing people for very senior engineering roles is how to tell the difference between somebody who was nearby when some interesting work got done, and somebody who made something interesting happen . What I’m looking for in a principal engineer is someone who turns good teams into great teams; who steers the organization away from disastrous mistakes; who enables the business to accomplish…
That's the challenge in all engineering interviews - determining weather they did anything useful or were just on the team. I've had to tell people to stop telling me about "we" and tell me what "you" did. Some people are so caught up in trying to be a team player that they hide their contributions. Others use it to hide their lack of contribution. It's not hard to separate these once you're aware of the issue and st…
Another useful technique I've developed for interviewing senior folks is to probe them for details about important technical or other decisions that were made related to the things they say they did. I'll then challenge those decisions and make them justify and explain.
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I feel I do great during the interview, it's just getting to that point is where I'm struggling. Writing that out seems to really bring out a part of my brain that makes it always feel braggy. (I really think it's the fact that during a conversation I have realtime feedback on what the interviewer wants and what parts I should focus on) I'm "full time" looking for a job at the moment, and it's rough with how much of…
> A lot of no responses, no way to gauge how i'm doing, and even when rejections come in there's no information along with them to help me understand why or how to improve If you don't come out of an interview and know you have an offer coming your way: assume you have no offer coming your way. It's usually very obvious and both parties are trying to say your hired without actually showing your cards. It's kind of a…
It's funny how i've been on the other side of the interview many times, and all the advice I'm hearing here rings true, and I know it is, but I just seem to have this blocker where I'm judging myself too harshly in all the wrong areas.
Regardless, I really do appreciate it, and i'm going to try and be more blatant and firm in this process.
Re: companies that claim to have a fully equivalent technical track: What I've found is that is mostly lip service. Yes, they publish salaries and requirements for the highest levels of engineering, and those salaries are equivalent to high levels of management as far as pay goes. But if you look a little deeper you see the problem. At Google and Amazon and Facebook, a Distinguished Engineer is equivalent to a Vice P…
I would argue that for a Distinguished Engineer to have as much impact as a run-of-the-mill VP, they have to be the best at the world at what they do.
I agree i’ve never heard an understandable explanation as to why a company with 1 or 2 principal engineer level employees can have hundreds of VPs.
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I absolutely hated my job as the dev lead for a medium size ($1 billion in revenue) non software company where we were a “cost center”. I liked helping smart developers who wanted to learn, I liked having a seat at the table to decide my own destiny and the level of autonomy to decide the “how”. I didn’t like the red tape, the political jockeying, meetings and more meetings etc. I wasn’t really learning anything that…
Promotions are just a form of vendor lock-in that (especially) small companies employ to keep people longer. I’ve seen barely two years out of college non cs majors promoted to senior engineer based on finishing some “large project” which anyone else in the engineering team could have done. The real sleezy thing is that by promoting someone to senior who isn’t nearly qualified at all, the company has now made it expo…
After one year of moderate effort I too got the promotion, with almost no pay raise. The problem of giving everyone a certain title is you basically completely dilute any meaning or status it conveys.
I soon went on to FANG and am now a regular ol' Software Engineer again. But I'd much rather be bottom rung at a top company than a "Senior" whatever at a company where it means nothing.
Unfortunately the Principal title has been abused and cheapened by some orgs. In some ways necessarily, as comps in tech have grown it’s become necessary to hire people at a Principal level in order to get the necessary comp. In other orgs it’s been a way to lure people who are attracted to the title. Ideally Senior positions would be more respected and have a greater comp range. But now it feels like Senior is almos…
Title inflation. When someone takes a job with you they want the higher title so that they can get the next title at the next job, because in most orgs title and pay are tied together.
If we didn’t tie comp to a small number of discrete “levels” an instead made it a smoother slope, then people wouldn’t be so focused on levels and titles.